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Installing Goanna

What you need

The current supported development target is Linux with Godot 4.5 and a working Vulkan driver. A discrete GPU is strongly recommended. Goanna renders more lighting and distant terrain than the vanilla client, so performance depends on GPU, CPU, view distance, shader settings and the server's streaming limits. See system requirements for measured guidance.

Luanti is required only for Start Game. Goanna launches the Luanti server locally and connects through the normal protocol. Join Game can connect to a remote server without a local Luanti installation.

Which Luanti Start Game uses

Goanna looks for Luanti where each kind of package puts it: distribution packages (Debian and Ubuntu keep their games under /usr/share/games/minetest), Flatpak (user and system installations), Snap, AppImages in the usual folders, and on Windows the unpacked zip or the self-extracting build. When it finds more than one, it uses the one you chose, or else the first that has a game. Change on the Start Game screen lists everything it found, with each install's games and data folder.

Get ready to play

If Goanna finds no Luanti, or the one it found has no games, Start Game offers Get ready to play: one button that gets both, with no password and no package manager.

  • The server. The Linux release carries its own Luanti 5.17.0 server (Goanna/luanti-server/), built unmodified from upstream and needing nothing from the system. Goanna copies it into its own data folder, where its worlds are kept. On Windows it downloads the official Luanti zip, as Install Luanti does below. Run from a source checkout on Linux, it uses dist/luanti-server/ after tools/release/build-luanti-server.sh, or else Flathub.
  • The game. When the Luanti has no games, it downloads Mineclonia 0.123.1 from ContentDB (29 MB), the release Goanna's materials are made for, checks it against the hash Goanna carries and installs it into that Luanti's games. Luanti's own Content tab can update it or add others later.

It then opens Start Game with a new world ready. Checked from nothing to a running world in clean Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, Debian 12, Fedora 42 and Arch containers (tools/test/test-fresh-install.sh), and through the menu on Bazzite with a GPU. The server needs glibc 2.35 or newer, so Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or anything later. macOS has no Goanna release yet, so it is not covered.

Choose Luanti myself, or Change on the Start Game screen, opens the list of what Goanna found instead, with these options:

  • Locate Luanti takes the folder Luanti was unpacked into, its bin folder, the Luanti program itself, or an AppImage.
  • Install Luanti installs the Flathub build on Linux (the confirmation shows the exact flatpak commands first). On Windows it downloads the official Luanti 5.17.0 zip from GitHub, checks it against the hash Goanna carries, and unpacks it into Goanna's own data folder, where its worlds are kept too. On macOS, or on Linux without Flatpak, use Download page or your distribution's packages instead.
  • Get ready to play appears when the chosen Luanti has nothing to start, and installs Mineclonia as above.
  • Open Luanti starts that install's own client, where other games can be installed from its Content tab; press Rescan after.
  • Show where Goanna looked lists every place it searched, for a bug report when your install is still not found.

Not yet tried on Windows itself: the Windows lookup, the Windows install and Get ready to play on Windows have only been exercised against the real zip unpacked on Linux.

Updates

A downloaded release keeps itself up to date. When the menu opens it asks GitHub for the newest release, and if there is one it offers Update and restart on the main screen. The update downloads, is checked against the maintainer's signature, replaces Goanna's own files and starts the new version. Worlds, settings and materials are kept in Goanna's data folder and are not touched. About shows the version you have, checks on demand and can turn the check off. If Goanna is installed somewhere it cannot write to, it says so and you download the new release yourself. A source checkout never updates itself.

Releases before 0.11.0 do not have this, so moving from 0.10.0 means one last download by hand.